Tall Paul | Page 4 of 16 | [A Geeky Blog]

I noticed this morning that I’m not handling the player character very well. If you’re piloting a ship when you save, then load that save into SpaceEditor, then save… it loses the player character, and corrupts the save. Not very useful. So, my longterm goal (ie: in the next day or so) is to properly handle the player character, and let you pick a ship to control, or dump him (you) in the depths of space as you see fit. For now however, this release just refuses to load a save if you’re piloting a ship.

Also, I’ve made the treeview a bit nicer (changed the entity IDs to useful names like ‘Big Ship’ etc) and added a ‘delete’ button (by popular request).

Enjoy!

Space Editor Release 3 9.68 KB

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SpaceEditor Released

October 27, 2013
coding, gaming, ...
8 comentarios

(I’ve since released a newer version of this software, which you can find here)

Just a quick post about a project I’ve been working on over the weekend: SpaceEditor.

Capture

This is a basic savegame editor for the really rather excellent ‘Space Engineers’ (which you can find on steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/244850/?snr=1_7_15__13)

The game itself is a bit basic at the moment, it’s still in ‘early Alpha’ stage, so there’s not actually a great deal to do other than build ships and crash them into things. One thing that’s conspicuously missing at the moment is the ability to save / load your creations. You can save a whole ‘world’, but extracting your design from that world just isn’t enabled…yet.

That’s what this tool is aimed at. The current feature set is:

Load a save game (you need to browse to the ‘SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbs file in your savegame folder)
Export any ships from that game into files (Make sure you have a ship entity selected in the tree before you press this!)
Import ship files back into a save game
clone a ship within the world (again, you have to have a ship entity selected!)

And it lets you do stuff like this:

I’ll be open sourcing the project as soon as I’ve tidied it up, but for now you can grab the executable here:

*UPDATE* check here for the latest version: http://www.tall-paul.co.uk/category/coding/space-editor/

WARNING: this should be considered even more pre-alpha than the game itself. If it completely mangles that ship you just spent 3 days building, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Because I did. Just now.

Edit: New version released, this should be much quicker at loading…. I’ve updated the download link.

ExtendedLife.co.uk

October 9, 2013
Uncategorized

After a month or so of effort in my spare time, the new version of ‘Extended Life’ launches today. From an original site running joomla with the Hikashop plugin, I’ve migrated to a Magento based store with an integrated wordpress site. A responsive theme is used to enable a decent mobile experience, and the increased performance and sophistication of magento should ensure that sales increase as well!

Click the image below to go to the site.

Category based shipping in magento

September 15, 2013
coding, magento, ...
30 comentarios

One of the things that’s always annoyed me about Magento is the dearth of decent, free shipping modules available for the system. Out of the box you can do a reasonable amount with regards shipping, setting a flat rate or using one of the built in shipping methods…but if you want to do anything fancy (and in my experience, people always do) then you need to pay out for one of the many customisable shipping modules available.

It’s been nearly a year since I last looked at Magento, but a recent freelance project has meant me getting back into it and as the client has some very specific shipping requirements, I thought I’d write my own shipping module. I spent a few hours fiddling with config files, before rememebering why Magento always annoyed me so much (hint, it’s the config files) and used the rather brilliant magento module generator to get me started.

Here’s what I wanted from a shipping module:

Different shipping rates for individual products
Different shipping rates to different countries
Easy assigning of shipping rates to products

So, to tackle these problems I came up with a module that uses Shipping rules defined through categories. This means you can setup your rules, and then use the standard product / category concept in Magento to assign your shipping rates.

Once you install the module (see below for a download) each category gets a new attribute under its ‘general’ tab, named ‘Shipping’. That’s where you enter your rules. Rules are extremely simple, and consist of a series of lines, each of which is made up of ‘country code’ = ‘price’

here’s an example of one ruleset:

This translates to ‘If the delivery address is in the UK, free shipping. If it’s in the European union, shipping is 3.00, for the rest of the world it’s 5.00’.

You can have as many lines as you want (they’re processed top to bottom) and if you have multiple items in your basket that produce different shipping rates, the most expensive rate is picked (there’s no option to sum the rates together yet, I might add that in at some point).

You can add these rules to your actual, published product categories or do what I’ve done for this client and set up a seperate tree of ‘Shipping categories’ like so:

So there you go. Bit basic, but does what I needed it to do.

Here’s the download link (upload the ‘app’ folder from the archive into the root of your magento installation):

Category Shipping Module 6.03 KB

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Play spotify through a different sound device (windows)

Just a quick post today about how to solve a common (maybe) frustration…

My setup when I’m working is that I sit at my desk in the kitchen, with spotify open to have some nice background music going on. However, my nice amp with its decent bass levels and all the rest is sat in the living room. That’s not really a problem, since I have one of these which allows me to play music from my laptop via bluetooth to the amp. However, the standard setup in windows means that you have one ‘default’ sound device, and that’s the one that spotify uses. So if I want my system sounds to come out of my laptop speakers (rather than, for example, conducting skype conversations via my amp) it means I have to play music through the laptop speakers as well.

Until I found this:

http://www.equalify.me/

With the simple addition of this rather wonderful piece of (free update: equalify is no longer free according to comments from readers, it now costs $5) software I can happily play spotify through my amp via bluetooth while keeping everything else through my ‘default’ laptop speakers.

Here’s how it works. First, in windows select your default audio device. Remember, this should be the device you want everything except spotify to play through.

The easiest way to do this is to right click on the volume mixer icon in your taskbar and select ‘playback devices’. You should see a window like this:

right click on the device you want to use as the default (if it isn’t already set as such) and select ‘set as default’. Again, remember this is the device you want to play everything except spotify through.

Now, download and install equalify from here: http://www.equalify.me/?page=download

Once it’s installed, fire up spotify and you should see a new icon next to your search bar, like this:

Click it, and the equalify window should open at the top left of your spotify window. Right click on the equalify window and wight click to activate the context menu. Select ‘options’ and then ‘change sound device’ like so:

From the window that pops up, use the drop down to select the audio device you want to use and then click ‘Set New Output Device’:

Now restart spotify.

And that’s pretty much it, spotify should now play through the device you selected.

As well as allowing playback through different audio devices, equalify also acts as an equaliser… if you like that sort of thing.

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